


charcoal and crayon

by Humanities_Handbag



Category: Coco (2017)
Genre: F/M, don't read while operating heavy machinery, hi there I'm here to cloG YOUR ARTERIES, this will absolutely give you toothache, way too short and way too sweet, what's up y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 11:58:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13546863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Humanities_Handbag/pseuds/Humanities_Handbag
Summary: in which a child never stopped drawing, and a father never stopped collecting.a story of fathers, daughters, wives, and attics.





	charcoal and crayon

**Author's Note:**

> I promise, I'll write a longer fic soon. But today's not that day.

It’ll be with an exorbitant amount of trust that Héctor will sit beside Imelda on a blustery Tuesday evening. She’d been accompanied only by a cup of something hot and spicy, and was in the midst of re-reading Anna Karenina when the cushion had dipped and she’d tilted her chin over the pages of a wild literature driven kiss to look at her husband, furled in on himself like a dead spider. 

“Here…” he reached out his hands.

“Héctor-”

“ _Here_ ,” he insists. His two hands are out, and he holds something between them. Anna is forgotten and put beside the steaming mug, and she leans forward, squinting. “I figured… if I’m living here, then you should know me?”

“I do know you, Héctor.” She squints at the thing. It’s barely the size of a hummingbird, and it flutters when she breathes. 

He shakes his head, pressing his cupped hands closer. “No I mean-” he makes a little frustrated noise. “Get to know me. Again, maybe?”

“I’m _reading_.”

“Please?” Anna, still beside her, seems to huff forlornly. Pages drifting down to flatten in a sulk. 

Imelda rolls her eyes, but complies, shifting forward on the little sofa to sit nearer to him. 

“What is it?” 

“It’s…” he looks for a word. “It’s all I have, really. All I _had_.” The last line comes with a tentative smile her way, and she returns it, pleasure blooming bright when he straitens up a little more. 

He’s showing her his most prized possession, she realizes. Just as she’d showed love for him in bold words and a held hand at death’s second door. It’s an offering at its highest. “Alright.” He brightens.

“Here, hold out your hands. No- like- sí. Like that.” He instructs her the way a nurse instructs how to hold a baby, and she follows along, letting him drop the precious scrap of a thing against her fingers. 

It’s wrinkled and barely visible. And years of water stains had broken down the paper fibers into little more than a delicate strip of fluttering sepia. As fragile as a tea-strainer and as thin as the same, it almost seems to hover in Imelda’s palm as she turns it this way and that under the light.

He’d pulled it from the pack on his side, and she watches him, watching her.

He trusted her to hold it. But Imelda had seen the way he’d flinched. Fear in passing over the irreplaceable.

The child’s drawing comes to life under the glaring light of a lamp in the parlor. A scribble of Coco, her Papá a green smudge by her side. Imelda stands beside him, all purple and red, holding his hand.

“She made it before I left. The last time I left.” He reaches for it, and then pulls back, allowing Imelda to hold it further. “I died with it.”

Imelda turns it again. She looks up. Héctor’s eyes are sheen with nerves and tears. 

Imelda remembers well that she had died with some little things, too. A photograph she’d kept on her bedside. Her favorite choker. She places the thin little thing beside her on the couch. “Come with me,” she takes his hand, mirroring the picture as best she can.

* * *

Héctor follows her up two sets of stairs, and is directed by Imelda to root around the Rivera family attic. It’s cluttered. Boxes sit around, names scribbled on them in fat marker. She brings out boxes upon boxes of dusty memorabilia. 

Long ago, she’d made a show of ripping his face off their most prized and recognizable picture. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t saved the rest of them, what few there had been. Héctor holding a newborn. Héctor with his new, prized guitar, Coco at his legs. Héctor and Ernesto, posing before their first paid set. She pushed that one away, back into the box. It seemed wrong to destroy anymore pictures, no matter who was featured in them.

“I used to keep one in my bedside table.”

“Habit?” he asks softly. His new paints are coated in dust, and she resists the urge to pat them down. Instead choosing to busy her fingers with picking up another photograph. Hazy with time, it’s one of them. Not her best one. But it’s their faces, and the idea of it tugs. 

They’d been the same age, once.

“Hope,” she replies. 

She puts the picture back, face down.

“Here. This is why-” she grunts, moving a chest from the shadows. He helps, standing in the low room to pull out the heavier box. It’s filled with children’s toys she hadn’t remembered putting in. “This is what I wanted to show you.” She moves through them until she reaches the paper on the bottom. 

The dozens of images all drawn in charcoal and, later, waxy bits of shoe polish or crayon. A daughters attempts at recreating her father. A child will always exaggerate, and his face is all nose and cheekbones and ears, and it’s crude at best, but he wipes his eyes hard and goes through each one meticulously, tracing the little smudges and juice stains.

His little treasure, still on the couch downstairs, is suddenly overwhelmed by the cove he’s unlocked. “She never forgot you,” Imelda pulls out more of them, spreading them out like a lovely deck of cards. “This one was on tu cumpleaños. This was… Día de los Padres, I think?”

She pointed to an especially dramatic one- a father holding his daughters hand. She’d tried to draw braids, and it had come out as little more than two purple vines sticking out from the sides of her head. His own hair was a thorny crown, a goatee made to look more like an upside down birthday hat glued to his oblong chin.

“She always waited. More than I did.” There’s a hint of regret there. Guilt, maybe. And he tells her that it’s displaced, letting his hand settle on hers. They’re not quite alright yet. They’re tentative and shy about what they are and what they will be. But she winds her fingers through his and it all sort of settles with the dust. “She loved you. She wanted me to love you, still. I think- I think she knew. I did, I mean.” It was Imelda’s turn to wipe her face. “I never let her in on that one. But you know Coco.”

“Smart girl.”

“The smartest. She could run circles round Julio in school. Probably why he fell for her, too.” Imelda wiped her face and inhaled fast, composing herself. She dusted off her skirts and collected all the drawings. “We can find a place for these in our bedroom. I’m sure I have a few nice frames-”

“Our?”

“You know what I mean.” 

“ _Ours_ ,” he gets to his feet, taking a few of the pictures from her hands. Just to hold. “Does Coco know you kept these?”

Imelda shut off the light and began the rickety climb down the narrow stairs to their second floor landing. She waited for him to follow before she shut the door. “No. And you can make up for your time gone by embarrassing the poor girl. I’m sure she’ll love that.”

He laughed with her, allowing himself the bravery to swing an arm over her shoulder and pull her in as they traipsed down the hallway. He looked at the walls and mentally picked out the places he’d put all their pictures; new and old.

He feels her turn, and nearly separates, when there’s a soft kiss planted on his chin. Comforting in nature. Familiar in action. “Wherever you want,” she promises, reading into his floor plan. “I was thinking a few could go in the kitchen. We have some of Oscar and Felipe’s old drawings there, too.” 

* * *

The one he’d kept all this time is given the star treatment of laminate and a sturdy frame. When their bed is warmed by two sets of bodies instead of its usual one, he’ll put them one facing him on the bedside table.

* * *

When Coco does arrive, Imelda’s prediction was flawless. Coco, burying her face in her hands, laughs along as Héctor shows off each picture like it was plucked from the halls of the Louvre. “I drew your ears too big,” she says. “And that _nose_ \- ach, I was never an artist.”

“Nonsense! They’re perfect!” Héctor holds one up aside his own head, and she slaps the table, snorting and crowing out laughs. She only quiets when he leans across the table and the reams of paper to press a long, firm kiss against her brow. “I’m keeping them _all_.”

Her eyes spark. “Just wait until I show you the ones Miguelito drew of all us in art class.” The trills of a new laugh are starting up again. “Poor mijo will absolutely _hate_  me for showing you!” 

Héctor is nearly inconsolable in his impish glee.


End file.
